Composing A Nation

By Leon Botstein

The creation of the state of Israel and the history of Zionism as a modern
nationalist movement are among the most widely debated subjects in recent
history. Zionism was a direct response both to the European anti-Semitism of
the late nineteenth century, and to new national movements among groups and
nationalities within larger dynastic entities—primarily in Eastern Europe
where the large majority of European Jews resided. Zionism, especially after
the momentous publication of Theodor Herzl’s The Jewish State (1896) in
the wake of the Dreyfus Affair, took its cues not only from contemporary
French and German nationalism, but also from emerging efforts to forge
political and cultural independence in Poland (which had been divided into
three parts), the Czech lands, the Balkans, in Romania, and in Hungary. The
Jews of Europe, owing to extreme discrimination and legal and social
restrictions, were political pariahs. Their exclusion in Europe caused them to
see themselves not simply as bearers of a distinct religion but as a dispersed
nation, as valid and legitimate as both the oppressed and oppressor nations
around them: German, English, French, Polish, Czech, and Russian. The vibrant
nationalisms in Europe inflamed a desire for Jewish political autonomy.

The dream of the Jews as equal citizens with a different religious
persuasion within several European nations was completely exploded by the
events of European history after the Dreyfus trial. But this new Jewish
nationalism imitative of its European parallels required a new national
language. This is why Hebrew, the modernized transformation of the traditional
religious language, became the language of the Zionist movement and Israel,
displacing the use of Yiddish, the lingua franca of Ashkenazi Jews and
one of the great and rich languages of modern history. Just like the Czechs
and Hungarians, Jewish nationalists sought to generate communal pride in a
distinctive culture through literature and music.

The most striking aspect of the modern Jewish national project was that it
could not be realized within Europe itself. Where was this long sought-after
Jewish homeland to be, a place where Jews would no longer be pariahs? The
solution favored in the end by all proved both logical and convenient for the
European colonial powers. At the turn of the century, the vexing issue of what
Europe was to do with its Jewish population was elegantly answered by Zionism:
relocate them to some other part of the world, outside of Europe. The imperial
arrogance of the victors of World War I made this notion seem plausible. Some
of the non-European locations proposed for the Jewish state, such as Uganda,
seem incredible now. But the most compelling location was of course the place
that by tradition and religion was associated with the ancient Jewish nation,
Palestine—which, conveniently enough, was under the control of the English and
French after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. Encouraging Jewish settlement
in Palestine was doubly attractive to the European powers. Not only did
Zionism promise to get all the Jews out of Europe, but as grateful colonial
settlers, the Jews would provide ongoing leverage in the region for perpetual
conflict with the Arabs, which was of course greatly in Europe’s imperial
interests: divide and conquer. As long as everyone was constantly fighting
each other there, there was no chance that any viable Arab government could
form that would challenge European interests. During the interwar period the
presence of a thriving Jewish settlement in Palestine would help ensure that
the lucrative flow of arms and transitory alliances between Europe and corrupt
sheiks and princes could continue indefinitely.

Events, however, took a starkly different turn. By the mid-1920s a large
segment of European Jewry did emigrate, but primarily to the United States.
Comparatively few managed to get to Palestine before World War II. At the
Evian Conference in 1939, the non-European nations did not take up Hitler’s
offer to expel the Jews of Europe, with the exception of the Dominican
Republic which offered to take 100,000. The United States closed its doors
behind the façade of the quota system, and the British continued cynical
double-game by encouraging Jewish emigration to Palestine (for a fee) knowing
it would fuel Arab resentment. After the Holocaust and with the end of the
British mandate in view after 1945, however, everything changed. By 1948 there
was a community large enough and sufficient international momentum to
partition Palestine and create the state of Israel.

The establishment of the state of Israel, however, did not follow the
conventional pattern of independence and national emergence. The intensity of
the circumstances that brought about partition and the war of independence
formed the outlines of the political situation that the world continues to
struggle with today. During the Cold War and after, despite the veneer of a
post-colonial world, it suited the leading powers to have the Middle East
conflict remain unresolved. Unlike many new nations in the twentieth century,
the major part of the population of Israel did not represent a people that
resided on the same land in a continuous manner for generations. They lived in
a land that had to be reconstructed and reinvented. The new Israeli population
had to make sense of discontinuity, and to generate quickly a relationship
between land, culture, and language that would bind them into a sustainable
country. The new Israelis had the Bible and the story of the ancient kingdom
of Israel, but when they arrived from their European towns and villages to the
Middle Eastern landscape and encountered indigenous populations both Jewish
and Arab with whom they were entirely unfamiliar, these newly minted citizens
realized they had to construct a new unifying national sensibility.

For Americans, this challenge is perhaps more easily understandable than to
Europeans. To North America, as well, Europeans came as settlers to a foreign
landscape populated by dramatically different cultures. There is a fundamental
difference, however, in the way in which the American European settlers forged
their country and the way the Israelis forged theirs. In America, the settlers
wiped out the indigenous population through war and disease. The narrative of
conquest was substituted by the narrative of discovery of an empty and fertile
new world. But the settlers in America came from often fanatical and not
entirely homogenous elements from Europe, separated from one another by
national origin and religion. In order to create a shared American identity,
which still took a century after independence from Britain, the focus had to
be not on blood and soil but on the concept of shared citizenship in a
democracy where the privilege of citizenship could be acquired even by the
foreign born, and where there was strict separation of church and state. In
the case of Israel the settlers before independence, as pawns in the game of
Ottoman and European imperialism, never enjoyed full civil rights. And the
indigenous population of Arabs had no intention of making way for the
newcomers. The new Israel fashioned a commonality on the basis of a shared
Zionist dream and the experience of past oppression. The founding of Israel,
unlike the United States, was therefore characterized by a sense of religious
and cultural coherence. Nonetheless a sense of a new nationality, a conscious
architecture of identity, needed to be created rapidly. Hence in the first
years the socialist Kibbutz movement flourished. It took shape out of an
idealism inherent in some sectors of the Zionist movement that a better state
should be created than the ones left behind in Europe. Faced with the rare
historical opportunity to begin a country from scratch, the early generations
of Israelis dreamed of what the perfect democratic nation would be, a nation
by design, freed from all the baggage of history and convention.

Amazingly, a tremendous portion of this effort at national self-invention
was assigned to the arts. Herzl’s dream of the new state as one of high
culture was embraced by the Zionist pioneers. The creation of orchestras,
dance and theater companies was considered an essential act of national
self-assertion. Three of the composers on today’s program came to Palestine as
refugees fleeing the Nazis. Ödön Partos, Paul Ben-Haim and Josef Tal brought
with them a deep familiarity and attachment to the modern European vocabulary
of musical expression. Faced with the desert landscape, the rich and diverse
culture of the Middle East, the explicit and implicit demand on one’s muse
made by changing one’s name and language, how as musicians and composers could
they express their own personal reinvention, much less that of an entire
nation?

Tal’s answer was to sustain the modernist project in music as a
universalist template that could be adapted to the experience of modern Israel.
But when I interviewed him at the public celebration of his ninetieth birthday
in Berlin, I was reminded of how difficult the task must have been for Tal to
reconcile his allegiance to the great tradition of German music with his
tireless patriotism and efforts on behalf of Israel’s musical culture and
identity. He fit all the affectionate albeit cutting stereotypes applied to
German Jews as self-styled taste-makers and cultural arbiters.

Paul Ben-Haim was a composer whose music was particularly liked by Leonard
Bernstein. He took a more conservative expressive turn than Tal. He was more
explicit in following a path charted by composers from Dvo?ák to Copland who
tried to incorporate folk elements. He used the late Romantic idiom in a
manner that permitted the appropriation of distinct markers of national
identity and place. Of the generation of Israeli composers on today’s programs,
Paul Ben-Haim’s music is perhaps the most symbolic of Israel’s independence
and the most frequently performed. His Fanfare for Israel (1950) is often used
to celebrate Israel’s Independence Day. Despite his success, the difficulty of
Ben-Haim’s exile and emigration should not be underestimated. His massive
oratorio Joram (1933), written as he waited to emigrate, deserves a new
first-class contemporary performance. It is a monument to how music can
express suffering, isolation and hope.

Ödön Partos came from the rich and vibrant early twentieth-century context
of Hungarian art and culture. Bartók and Kodály are the most persuasive
examples of how twentieth century composers created a musical vocabulary that
permits both personal expression and the articulation of national
consciousness. What marks Partos’s work on this program is its connection to
the Kibbutz movement and the notion that universal compositional techniques
could be reconciled with the need to express something particular and local.
Resisting the idea of the artificial invention of a new Mediterranean style,
Partos found a way to meld modernism with distinctive elements that would make
his music expressive of a landscape and experience that was not European but
in a novel way Israeli, representative of the idealism of the Kibbutz movement.
There is an intensity and emotional angularity that reflects Partos’s roots in
Hungarian modernism.

Mordecai Seter, who was the first in this group of composers to come to
Palestine (in 1926), was born in Russia on the Black Sea. Seter was a
representative of the single largest Ashkenazi contingent to emigrate to
Palestine, that of Russian Jewry (defined by pre-1918 borders), the contingent
that also provided most of the political leadership in the Zionist movement
and in the first years of Israel’s independence. Seter began his musical
education in Palestine and unlike the others he returned to Europe to study, a
sojourn that included working with Paul Dukas and Nadia Boulanger. Seter chose
to base most of his mature musical work on sources from the Sephardic
tradition. By so doing he anticipated the enormous influence Sephardic Jewry
would have on the character of Israel. After 1948 the emigration from Yemen
and Morocco brought to Israel an entirely different Jewish experience. The
basis of Seter’s magnificent piece are the liturgical and musical traditions
of Mizrahi and Yemenite song.

Many years have passed since the music on this program was written. The
most important factor (apart from the 1967 and 1973 wars) affecting Israel’s
culture has been the Russian immigration that began with the Refusniks in the
1970s and blossomed after the fall of Communism. Israel today hosts an almost
unbelievable array of composers, each of whom struggles with the problem of
how to transform the particular experience of Israel into musical creations
that can resonate as more than mere emblems of identity. The works on today’s
program achieve these goals. They are not reductive markers of some version of
what it means to be an Israeli.

The Israel of today has developed in both popular and concert music a
distinctive and complex Israeli identity, quite different from Diaspora Jewish
sensibilities. This varied and complex synthesis includes elements from the
German European tradition, the Eastern European tradition, the Russian
tradition, the varieties of Sephardic culture, and the powerful Palestinian
Arab influence. Each is encountered on a daily basis in the context of
everyday life. In today’s concert we hear the first stirrings of how music
functioned as an important vehicle not only of individual expression but of a
need to craft a new natural sensibility out of the embers of the destruction
of European Jewry. The pride and optimism inherent in the works of these
composers is matched by the talent they had and the courage they showed in
restarting careers cut short by the events of the 1930s and 1940s. These
composers represent poignantly the extent to which Herzl’s dream of the new
Jewish state as a state defined the highest pinnacles of human achievement—art,
scholarship and learning—was deeply cherished at the moment of the founding of
the state of Israel. This idealism was sustained through the 1950s and 1960s
when there was still an optimism that a new kind of society could be fashioned.
But the grim realities of international politics and war and strife have made
life more difficult than any of these composers might have anticipated.